Buberian Intersubjectivity and Racist Encounters

In this essay, I explore a few ways that the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber can contribute to the philosophy of race. More specifically, I will here explicate what Buber's dialogical "ontology of the inter-human" in I and Thou and Distance and Relation can tell us about racist encounters. I begin by defining our term "racist encounter" via a brief analysis of an exemplary case, and then explicate the Buberian frameworks of intersubjectivity born out of our respective texts, applying each to the racist encounter under consideration. Through this exercise, I reach the counterintuitive conclusion that, vis-a-vis Buberian intersubjectivity, in a racist encounter neither the addressed nor the addressee is a self. I then respond to the objection by demonstrating the unique contribution his philosophies of intersubjectivity stand to offer in comparison to the philosophical foundations underlying Frantz Fanon's denouncement of racism in Black Skin, White Masks.